Interview with: The Ferros

Nicole and Vincenzo (Nico + Vinx) are The Ferros, a beautiful husband and wife team who produce equally beautiful fine-art and destination wedding photography. Both starting out in advertising, they really know a thing or two about creating a story – producing images with palpable drama and emotion. We chat to Nico + Vinx about their work and their inspirations. Enjoy…

Tell us a little bit about yourselves and how you both became interested in photography.
We met in the crazy world of advertising years ago, working as a creative team; Vincenzo as an Art Director, Nicole, a Copywriter. We’ve been in this game for more than a decade. Being in advertising gave us great opportunities to travel around the world, collaborating with many talented directors, photographers and authors. At some point in our lives we realised we were both searching for something different, a way to push ourselves further, we just wanted to go out from our comfort zone. Photography was the answer. It was there, waiting for us to realise it was exactly what we wanted to pursue, as we both separately enjoyed street, travel and portrait photography for several years before we met each other. Then we jumped into our current project, The Ferros, being wedding photographers and shooting love stories around the globe.

What would you like to achieve with your photography?
The greatest achievement would be to leave a meaningful trace of ourselves – it doesn’t have to be a renowned piece of art, it’s more about finding our signature, that something in which other people can find themselves too. The power we have to make a moment last forever – it’s a part of our job we’ll never take for granted. Our daily goal is, in fact, to try to make every single shot a truly unique one; it’s not about being a perfectionist, it’s about going to sleep knowing you’ve got the most out of that moment, of that person, of you, as a photographer.

You work together as a photographic team; do you both shoot or does one of you direct while the other shoots? How does it work?
We think and work as a team ever since the beginning, it’s a method we made ours from our previous job. We brainstorm and then prepare the shoot always with an idea in our mind. We don’t need to talk a lot between us during the shoot, most of the time a glance is all we need to know how to move. Plus, we trust our feelings in the moment, above all trying to follow and empathise with the people we’re shooting – it doesn’t matter if it’s a wedding or a portrait session.

Who or what are your main influences and sources of inspiration for your work?
There are so many amazing and different sources of inspiration in this world that it’s basically a never ending choice! We love cinema, from the insanely genius composition of Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson to the painterly touch of Bernardo Bertolucci to the sweet disillusion of François Truffaut’s characters to the darkest scenarios of Lars von Trier. And so many more. And then art, in all its shapes, from the paintings of John William Waterhouse to Edward Hopper, to the photography of Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Gregory Crewdson, William Eggleston, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Viviane Maier. The list could literally go forever and ever…

Your couples and wedding photography has a very personal feel to it, like you are best friends with the couple and they are absolutely comfortable with you taking their photos; how do you get that level of trust with your couples? What are your tips for ensuring that the images look so relaxed and intimate?
We strongly believe in human interactions, even though we are aware that this is not the easiest thing ever. Meeting someone for the first time it doesn’t mean they are available to tell you their whole story or that they’ll be comfortable being in front of a camera. So, one of the things that comes quite easy to us is simply making people feel that they can really be themselves, free. We don’t want them to worry about being pretty; they can be silly, they can whisper things to each other we won’t be able to ear! This puts people in a mental and physical comfort spot. It has also happened that we have become real friends after the shoot with some incredible humble people we wouldn’t have met if it wasn’t for our job.

What is next for you both? Are you working on any projects that you can tell us about?
Being creative is more than a state of mind, it is how you look at the world surrounding you, it is how much you wonder about the things you think you know and the things you don’t. We’ve learnt that staying curious, travelling, keep asking questions of yourselves; it’s essential to have ideas, new points of views. So, we pretty much always have a project in our mind that we’re dreaming of, or as work in progress. We had a very long trip in the USA this summer, we’ve travelled across the West coast through California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona… having seen so many mind-blowing places and people, we have since made a couple of projects out of this experience. One is already online on our website as a personal project – and has also been published in a few online magazines. The other has been conceived as a trip into the emptiness and harshness of those timeless corners of the planet. Being based far away from the US, we wanted to be prepared as much as possible before getting there. We did most of our initial location scouting via Google Earth, books and a lot of research for about 8 months. So it was very demanding, but it was rewarded with something that we are proud of. It should be online soon, stay tuned!